Let 2017 be the year you take new risks, make bold decisions and find new ways to transform, innovate and disrupt.

We live in a time when doctors no longer have to rely on costly and unwieldy medical imaging devices to diagnose illnesses. A simple “visual stethoscope” would help them see deep into the human body more easily than ever, thereby accelerating both diagnosis and therapy. Meanwhile, if you’re a chronically ill patient, you no longer have to make repeated, costly visits to the hospital. Say hello to Molly -- an innovative, friendly, virtual nurse who can check up on you, monitor your vitals and provide follow-up care -- all through your smart phone. Read more: click image or title.

If there's one thing all management experience has taught me, it's that feedback is one of the most important parts of the relationship between an employer and employee. It is also one of the most complicated--especially when it comes to critical feedback.

But constructive criticism is very much a necessary part of work life, so it needs to be handled well and in real-time.

Kim Scott's Radical Candor is a great way to think about delivering feedback that might not always be easy to hear, but is important nonetheless. Kim, a former Google and Apple executive, often points to an experience during her early days at Google when her then-boss Sheryl Sandberg told her she said "um" too often during an otherwise slam-dunk presentation. Sheryl was clear in her criticism and suggested Kim get a speech coach (at Google's expense) to address the issue. Here is a further explanation of why this works: Read more: click image or title.

I remember the first time I became a leader, I called a meeting with my team and said, "Here are my expectations of you." When I finished, I asked if there were any questions, and one of the team raised his hand and said: "Do you know what are our expectations of you?" As this was my first leadership role, the question took me by surprise -- and to be honest, I didn't, as I had only ever thought about leadership from the perspective of the leader. It was understanding their perspective and what was expected of me that allowed me to improve my leadership.

“Rather than the typical client/vendor relationship I'm used to, Growthink has been more like a strategic partner and trusted advisor. Not only did they provide me with a dynamic business plan but they have given me invaluable advice and feedback along the way. They have exceeded my expectations in every way possible during this exciting but uncertain time of starting & ultimately growing my business.”

Just four years ago, DesignMyNight.com were two people. Two years later we were five, and today, we are 20. Just four years ago we were working from Starbucks. Today, we are in an Old Street open-plan warehouse office space. The journey has been short but the expansion has been big.

Last week my business co-founder Andrew and I sat down and wondered if we had lost our startup spirit. As a brand new company, it was easy to get washed away with the excitement of being a startup – few bills to pay, few clients to worry about, only a few new members of the team. This was why we left our corporate snooze jobs; working hard for the boss wasn’t cutting it for us. Read more: click image or title.

The most intelligent and successful people ask a lot of questions. Here's how to use what you don't know to your advantage.

Asking the right questions can mean the difference between success and failure. Unfortunately, asking questions can also feel uncomfortable.

"It can be embarrassing to admit that you didn't understand what someone said, or that you don't get it," says Heidi Grant Halvorson, associate director of Columbia Business School’s Motivation Science Center and author of No One Understands You and What to Do About It. "You might fear it will make you look incompetent, but that’s not true. Research has found that people who are inquisitive are generally judged to be more intelligent and engaged." Read more: click image or title.

If you manage a remote team, you know how important technology's role is to your success. See how these 12 software for distance workers can help to coordinate assets, clarify project details, and make virtual management a breeze.

The traditional "workplace" has been redefined by high-speed internet, collaborative technology, and the need to be in 5 places at once.

Coordinating assets, project details, and responsibilities doesn't have to be difficult. There are countless solutions that will meet your remote team's unique needs.

These 12 tools for distance workers stand out because of their flexibility, ease of use, and overall exceptional functionality. Read more: click image or title.

Disclaimer: the headline on this article promises you 11 steps to launch a startup. It does not promise you 11 easy steps or 11 simple steps or 11 anyone-could-do-it-before-breakfast-without-breaking-a-sweat steps.

Launching a startup is difficult—there's no way around that.

In the best of markets, 75% of venture-backed firms fail to deliver returns on their investments, according to 2012 research from Harvard Senior Lecturer Shikhar Ghosh.

Today, VC firms are debating whether that grim statistic might be exacerbated by a forthcoming tech bubble. Nevertheless, many entrepreneurs decide to launch companies every year.

If you're determined to join their ranks, here's what you need to know about how to launch your business so it lasts.

They say in business you should think big. But when it comes to your career, have you considered thinking “small”? In my experience, a startup is a roller-coaster ride that can offer you incredible career experiences and teach you some invaluable life lessons.

Startups can make you more efficient than you’ve ever been, and they can help you expand your responsibility and knowledge and learn how any business, despite challenges, can effectively get off the ground.

Start Doing Real Work

The feeling you get when you work for a startup is rather hard to describe. In some respects, it’s a little like taking the red pill and getting ejected from the Matrix. Everything you do in a startup makes a difference. No longer are you surrounded by a safety blanket world where you’re a small cog in a large machine. In a startup, everything you do will contribute to the ultimate success or failure of the business.

In my experience, leaving a large organization and heading to a startup felt liberating. In the early days, it felt like every piece of code I wrote was making a difference. In fact, startups actually push you to identify and focus on what’s absolutely critical, forcing you to think more creatively about how you approach projects and create value. And best of all, you’ll often get to see results first-hand and share in the rewards and glory.

Learning and Responsibility

I unequivocally say I learned more in my first two months in a startup than I did in the previous five years of my professional career. The reason for this is that everyone in a startup is expected to wear multiple hats. A startup forces you to adopt new skills and responsibilities to make up for the small-sized taking on the huge challenges of building an empire.

In startups, fast learning can also lead to increased responsibility and multiple opportunities to both utilize and accelerate talents and knowledge. All of this can translate into powerful position in the business world and means you’ll have much more to offer as an individual, particularly when it comes time to move on or even start your own business.

Shape the Culture Around You

One of the areas that I’m most proud of at DesignCrowd is that we have built a culture where talented people come together and make work fun (work doesn’t feel like work). There’s nothing more rewarding than feeling excited to come into the office in the morning to tackle the next challenge the world has thrown at us.

You will also find that in startups, you get to shape the culture around you. Entering a larger organization usually means that you’ll be stepping into a predetermined culture, set with existing practices, customs and values. Joining a startup, on the other hand, often means that you can directly contribute to the creation and growth of the business culture, offering ideas and practices that can help shape the working philosophy of the company.

An Environment of Innovation

One of the most rewarding things about startups is that you can find yourself working with a team that is highly passionate and enthusiastic. This can spark inspiration on every level, leading to truly innovative ideas and developments that can help the business stand out against competitors in the greater industry.

Being part of an entrepreneurial team is also a wonderful way to learn how to innovate. Entrepreneurs are great people to learn from — they identify a problem and need to find a new efficient way to solve it.

Starting Your Own Venture

Joining a startup gives you the opportunity to start learning what it takes to be your own boss. While they take personal and financial sacrifice, startups pay you back in opportunities and knowledge on how to take charge of your own venture.

If you’re toying with the idea of one day being your own boss, working in a startup is the ideal place to educate yourself on how to set goals, execute strategies, take your product to market and implement strong business operations. You can also be required to take on other, more administrative business tasks, which can actually equip you with great business know-how.

“You learn that there are lots of details in any enterprise,” says CEO Richard A. Moran. “You might have to name the company, design a logo, find office space, figure out the legal entity, find an insurance carrier and all the thousands of mundane activities that one takes for granted in a larger company.”

The key startup lesson in all of this is to never underestimate the power of working for a startup organisation. Startups can equip you with invaluable hands-on tools and experience, growing your skills, knowledge and even responsibilities rapidly – and that’s something that’s difficult to come by in a medium or larger-sized organization.

Like James T. Kirk, Captain Jean-Luc Picard provides valuable insight for leaders in the present - and future.

“He’d ensure the safety of his ship and his crew And then complete the mission And make himself a better person Bring peace to the galaxy And do it for free Oh yeah, that’s what Captain Picard would do.”

The billionaire tech entrepreneur offers his best advice from hiring passionate employees to never hiring a PR firm.

Anyone who has started a business has his or her own rules and guidelines, so I thought I would add to the memo with my own. My "rules" below aren't just for those founding the companies, but for those who are considering going to work for them, as well.

1. Don't start a company unless it's an obsession and something you love.

Every founder knows that culture is crucial to a startup’s success — as Fred Wilson says, “If you want to be in business forever, you need to build a culture that sustains the business” — but there are seven common mistakes that startups make when creating their culture: Read more: click image or title.

There are seven mistakes that culture setups make. People just expect culture to just "happen." People also hire friends and hire too many people. They try to buy too many perks also. And lastly, they won't fire jerks because they're smart and they overwork people.

Back when I was a 23-year-old, newly minted pilot, the Navy put me in charge of my first flight squadron division. It was a role that called for leading a team of about 40 highly trained aviation technicians. Like any first-time leader, I was thrilled with this opportunity and could hardly wait to greet them with an inspiring talk.While I prepared this speech, which would surely rival anything from John F. Kennedy, the leader of this team of technicians – whose rank was chief petty officer -- stopped by for a visit.

“Lieutenant Ryan,” said this man, who was 14 years older than me, with nearly 20 years in the Navy, “the guys have heard good things about you as a person and a pilot. They’re excited to work with you.”

“Me, too,” I told him, already a little curious about what the chief might want to convey.

“I want you to get off to a good start, so if you don't mind,” he said, “could you tell me what you’re planning to tell them?”

Now, a little off balance, I tried to explain, rather inarticulately, what I had in mind.

The chief petty officer listened and then offered some sage advice. “You’ll be our third boss in five years,” he said, “so I can tell you what they would like to hear and, even more importantly, see." Read more: click image or title.

“Rather than the typical client/vendor relationship I'm used to, Growthink has been more like a strategic partner and trusted advisor. Not only did they provide me with a dynamic business plan but they have given me invaluable advice and feedback along the way. They have exceeded my expectations in every way possible during this exciting but uncertain time of starting & ultimately growing my business.”

Last week I talked to a young, first time founder. Before we even talked about Techstars, he said, “You know what, we have raised a little bit of cash, we have a good advisor, we are probably okay, we don’t need an accelerator.”

You cannot imagine how much I cringe when I hear that kind of statement.

It is very difficult for me to convey to first time founders what lies ahead of them. Indeed, if they knew, they wouldn’t do it. “You don’t know what you don’t know.” Read more: click image or title.

Slack CMO Bill Macaitis was Slack's marketing employee number one. Here's how the startup, now valued at 2.8 billion, has skyrocketed to success.

File "less pointless emails" under "things every employee wishes for." Take that, and add "no more waiting around for a response" (and the accompanying internal debate on how long to hold off before following up) and you have a more streamlined and productive work communications system.

Meet Slack, a communications tool seeking to do just that, enabling teams to message each other in real time, among other functions. A plethora of options for customization, a sleek design plus bells and whistles like shortcut Giphy embeds have made Slack a leader in the space. The tech and investor community has caught on. In April, just about a year after launching publicly, Slack was valued at 2.8 billion.

Read more: click image or title.

Learn more about funding, find great funding sources, get a free business plan template, post your funding request for free, and more:

It’s easy to make fun of bad startup ideas – Airbnb for toilets? – but it’s not so easy to pick the good ones ahead of time. Just ask venture capitalists, the vast majority of whom lose money. The difficulty of separating good ideas from bad is part of why angel investors end up investing based largely on the founding team.

So does the initial idea matter at all to a startup’s success?

New research helps answer this question and reinforces just how hard it is to pick a startup based on the idea alone. The paper, by Erin Scott of the National University of Singapore, Pian Shu of Harvard Business School, and Roman Lubynsky of MIT, finds that the perceived quality of a startup idea predicts success in some sectors, but not in others. If you’re investing in startups in life sciences or energy, for instance, the initial idea seems to matter more than if you’re investing in software or consumer products. Read more: click image or title.

More than100 million users count on Evernote’s Swiss-army-knife capabilities on almost every smartphone, tablet and laptop. CEO Phil Libin and his team have gotten the world hooked on productivity. That was the point, Libin says.

Evernote had the features the team wanted themselves—a note-taking, web-clipping, project-managing, almost-anything-you-can-think-of app that’s free for the taking in its basic format. And they know that once users start depending on Evernote, they may very well want to upgrade to the $45 per year Premium or the $120 per year Business versions.

But all of it almost didn’t happen. In 2008 the company was running out of money. Libin had decided to shut it down the next day. At 3 a.m., he was preparing to turn in for the night when he decided to check his email one more time.

Against all odds, there was an email from a Swedish investor and Evernote fan in his inbox. The investor eventually wired $500,000, enabling Libin to keep the company afloat.

Q: You have said that you want Evernote to still be a startup in 100 years. What do you mean by that?

A: A lot of entrepreneurs are taught to think: What’s the exit strategy? We were tired of that. We wanted something that would be our life’s work. You don’t need an exit strategy for your life’s work.

We asked ourselves, How might we design something that could be around for 100 years? Thinking about doing things that are durable is different from thinking about how to maximize profitability short-term. But we don’t just want to be a 100-year-old company—we want to be a 100-year-old startup. In 100 years, we want to still make quick decisions and not become bogged down by internal bureaucracy and politics.

Q: I read that you said that you have people working for you now who have worked for you in previous companies. How do you choose your team?

A: There are lots of people who’ve never had a job other than working with me. There’s this high chance that once we’ve worked together a few years, you’ll never need to work with anyone else, because either we will stay together in the company for a long time or you should have made enough money that you won’t ever have to take a job you don’t like.

For me, it’s always easy. I just always work with my friends. I have a lot of brilliant friends, and I work with more or less all of them. The first people you bring aboard are friends, and the others are the friends of friends. It just grows from there.

Q: What about co-founders? How do you know who will be a good partner?

A: There are no shortcuts. You just have to go with the best people you know, people with whom you share a common vision.

You don’t necessarily need to know them for a long time. Stepan Pachikov—the person who originally started the California team that became Evernote—and I had a team in Boston. He and I had met only a few months before we decided to combine the teams. But we hit it off right away.

Building and cultivating the team at every level—it starts with co-founders and then goes to early employees and later-stage employees—that is the central thing.

Q: You’ve said you shouldn’t hire anyone unless you’ll be able to fire them. And yet they’re also your friends.

A: If you want to be an entrepreneur, you’re not optimizing for the easy path. You’re not optimizing for fun. You’re optimizing for impact. There are a lot of things you have to know how to do or you shouldn’t be in this business. You have to be able to fire people.

It’s tough to give people a chance if you know that if it doesn’t work out, you can’t end a relationship correctly. And if you know that you can, it lets you give people a chance. It lets you hire people whom you’re pretty sure are going to be a perfect fit, but you don’t have to be 100 percent sure.

If you lose friends that way, it sucks, but there’s really nothing good to say about it other than the alternative is to never work with your friends, and that’s much, much worse.

Q: What would you say to people who would like to take the plunge into entrepreneurship?

A: Work on something that you honestly believe deserves to exist. Ask yourself, Is the universe better off because my company exists? If you can’t honestly say that, then you shouldn’t do it, even if you think it’s a good way to make money. Because you can never guarantee financially what your outcome is going to be. Being an entrepreneur takes up so much of your time, your life, your energy. If it were just about money, then I wouldn’t do it.

Q: How can small-business owners or entrepreneurs find success in a marketplace that always seems to change?

A: Focus on the product. Make products and provide services that you yourself want, love and use. It’s very hard to make something great if you’re making it only for somebody else, because you don’t have a gut feel for it.

A lot of young entrepreneurs ask, “What does the market need?” Then they come up with some idea that isn’t something they deeply care about. Unless you’re making the product for yourself first, it’s hard for you to know what is good. It’s hard for you to make it great. And products that aren’t great just aren’t going to succeed.

You have an infinite number of things that you could work on. Choose to work on things that you know about, understand, use, are in love with and want to work on for the rest of your life.

And that gives you the best chance of making something great enough to succeed.

You learn quite a few things going through SEAL training. You learn how to focus. You learn perseverance. You learn the fleeting nature of pain. Most of all, you learn how to summon the last iota of inspiration to carry you through the day.

Effective leaders must choose the right tactic for the right mission, no matter if it’s the boardroom or the battlefield. Inspiring others comes in myriad different forms. Here are 10 leadership guidelines to inspire others:

If you’ve managed a team for even a year, you know the crazy behavior that human beings can deliver. As a CEO for 23 years, I remember dozens of times I sat with my head in my hands, wondering what a team member was thinking, if anything. If you’re the type of leader who hates to confront people problems head on, this will be a painful (but essential) read.

In my last post, knowing that I’d be sitting with Hall of Fame quarterback and football legend Joe Montana, reader John O’Dea asked about the challenges of building a strong cohesive team out of so many high-octane individuals. He was thinking of the 49’ers team led by Bill Walsh, under whose leadership Joe Montana played most of his career. I was able to fire John’s question at Joe, and his answer came from the perspective of being one of the highest performing team members (not from being the leader).To read the full article, click on the title or image.

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